The winner of the Nero Wolfe, the Agatha, and the Macavity awards, as well as the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing, Robert Barnard here gives us the odyssey of Kit Philipson, a young Scot who finds out that his late parents—one a teacher, the other a journalist and a childhood refugee from Nazi Germany—were not his parents at all.

"Each new whodunit from this highly regarded British master is both predictable and innovative. Barnard is comfortably predictable in that his plotlines are always tightly composed, his characters are created 'in the round' and are not just types, and his writing style is precise. He is innovative because his novels always feature fresh situations for him to explore. The theme here is family undercurrents as the main character, a young man from Glasgow, Scotland, learns from his dying mother that he was adopted and that his real parents live in Leeds, England. Digging into his recently discovered past, Kit realizes that as a three-year-old he was abducted from his parents while the family was on vacation in Sicily. He proceeds to Leeds and presents himself to his original family as their long-lost son. Their reaction is friendly but not warm; something strikes Kit as wrong. He investigates further, attempting to establish a 'connection between a Leeds solicitor's family—his natural family—and a literary academic family in Glasgow headed by a Jewish refugee—his adopted family.' The reconstruction of his true past is a thoroughly gripping tale."—Booklist (starred review)